Double Feature

by Donald E. Westlake

  The building was narrow, and not very deep, so there was minimal floor-space. One entered from the street into a vestibule with a staircase leading up; the staircase too was covered with cheap carpeting. A sign hanging over the stairs was neatly hand-printed AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Another sign, waist-height, standing on its own chrome leg in front of the stairs, said INFORMATION, with an arrow pointing to the right.

  An interior wall had apparently been removed here, so that the vestibule and the former living room had become one oddly shaped receptionist’s office. It was appropriately furnished, including paintings that might have been views of the forests and lakes of Visaria but that looked to me like the forests and lakes of northern Michigan. A small rack of tourist literature near the entrance had an indefinably scraggy and hopeless air about it, as though even the Visarians could think of no sensible reason for anyone to visit their country.

  Several people were now in this room. Two of them were Staples and Bray, several others appeared also to have some sort of official connection with today’s event, and the last two were a weepy-eyed heavyset girl sitting at the receptionist’s desk and a truculent-looking bruiser hulking on one of the vinyl sofas. He reminded me for some reason of this morning’s funeral, probably because he seemed ethnic in much the same way. If Laura’s husband had grown up big enough to play professional football he might have looked a lot like this fellow.

  Staples, seeing me arrive, came over and said, quietly, “I won’t introduce you. We’ll just take a little walk through and I’ll describe the situation.”

  “Right.”

  “You see the girl sitting at the desk?”

  “The receptionist?”

  “Right. She came back from lunch at one o’clock this afternoon. So did the guard.”

  “The blocking back on the sofa?”

  “That’s the one. Visaria has its own political problems, just like everybody else. His job is to sit out here and make sure there aren’t any incidents.”

  “No wonder he doesn’t look happy.”

  “The point is,” Staples said, “both of those characters were in this room from one o’clock until after the body was found. Neither of them left for a second, not to go to the john, not for anything. They both swear to it.”

  “Could they be in cahoots with one another?”

  “Look at them,” Staples suggested.

  I looked at them. Judging from appearances—generally a good way to judge, by the way—between them they might just be able to figure out how to open a box of corn flakes. “Okay,” I said.

  “Now let’s go to the scene of the crime.”

  Staples led the way. We had to walk through the little cluster of people near the inner door, and it turned out that at least two of them were Visarian. Or anyway foreign, since they were speaking together in some language that seemed to consist principally of the letter “k,” spoken with varying degrees of emphasis. One of these two intercepted Staples on his way by, saying, “You are making progress?”

  “We are making progress,” Staples told him. They smiled at one another, and Staples moved on, me following. I too smiled at the Visarian, and he smiled back.

  Staples paused at the door. “As you see, it had to be broken in.”

  “Locked from the inside, eh?”

  “Locked and bolted. The door fit snugly. There’s no way to throw that bolt except from this side.”

  I studied the door, the wrenched wood, the hardware. I said, “And I assume the only fingerprints on the bolt belonged to the dead man.”

  “Of course.”

  “This is a pretty elaborate setup,” I said. “What’s it all about?”

  “There’d been threats on this fellow’s life,” Staples said. “Some political thing at home. So he spent his working hours in this room with the door locked on the inside. If anyone wanted to see him, the receptionist would buzz, tell him who was waiting, and he’d come over and unlock the door.”

  “All right.” I looked hesitantly into this inner room. “The body still here?”

  “No, it was taken away. He’d been strangled with wire, sitting there at his desk.”

  My adam’s apple gave a little twinge. “Charming,” I said, and roved around the room a bit.

  It was almost identical with the room outside; same ceiling, same paneled walls, same spongy carpeted floor. A little money had been spent on the desk, but the other furnishings were still bottom-of-the-line from some office furniture discount house. There was, however, a paper shredder in one corner, to show that this was a serious diplomatic operation.

  A pair of tall windows at the back had a clear close view of a brick wall. Heavy iron bars masked both windows on the outside. I said, “I assume those bars have been checked.”

  “Just as solid as they look,” Staples assured me.

  A door behind the desk led to a small bathroom done in the same minimal style as everything else. This would be the corner of the house directly behind the staircase. The one window in the bathroom was also guarded by iron bars, and was in any event too small to crawl through. I noticed two dirt smudges on the vinyl tile floor, but nothing else in here of interest.

  When I returned to the office, Bray had come in looking glum and harassed. “I hope you feel brilliant,” he told me.

  “Not yet,” I admitted.

  Staples said to Bray, “Give the man time.”

  “All he wants,” Bray said. To me he said, “By the way, in that Templeton case, the woman that went off the terrace, it looks as though you and Fred were right.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Bray shrugged. “We never came up with anything,” he said. “I resisted the idea, but I guess it really was suicide after all.”

  So George had gotten away with it. Good for him. I said, “They can’t all be murders, can they?”

  “I suppose not,” Bray said.

  Staples said, “But this one definitely is. Let me tell you the situation, Carey. The chief of mission, Ivor Kaklov, lived here in the building, up on the top floor. The receptionist and the guard also live here. They spent an ordinary morning, Kaklov in this office and the other two outside, and at twelve Kaklov came out and they went upstairs for lunch.”

  I said, “Locking the office behind them?”

  “No,” Staples said. “It was only kept locked when Kaklov was in it.”

  “How about the front door?”

  Bray said, “That was locked, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the kind you can open by slipping a credit card down between the door and the jamb.”

  I said, “So the killer came into the building while everybody was at lunch, and hid in here. In the bathroom, in fact.”

  Staples said, “Ah, good man. You saw those smudges on the bathroom floor.”

  “Of course,” I said. “We have sloppy weather outside. Even if the killer took a cab he wouldn’t get out right at this address, so he did some walking and he tracked dirty snow in with him. It melted while he waited for Kaklov to finish lunch.”

  Bray said, “That part we can work out for ourselves. We know how the killer got in, and what he did after he got here. The question is, how in hell did he get out again?”

  I nodded. “That’s the question, all right. I wonder what the answer is.”

  Nobody told me. So I turned away again, wandering around the room, looking at this and that. There was a certain atmosphere of disarrangement in the area of the desk, which was only to be expected, but otherwise the place retained its neat anonymity.

  Well, not quite. The paper shredder was out about three feet from the wall, standing alone and awkward into the room like a volunteer robot. It didn’t look as though it belonged there, so I went over to check, and from the indentations in the carpet I could see that the machine usually stood against the wall. It had been moved out here, by some person for some reason.

  It was a heavy machine, about waist height, but it moved readily enough on its casters. There was nothing underneath it. There
was no shredded paper in the white plastic bag in the bottom half. A dirt smudge on the beige metal top suggested nothing in particular. When I pushed the On button the machine gnashed its many teeth but nothing came out.

  Staples and Bray had been watching me, and now Staples came over to say, “Something?”

  “I’m not sure.” I frowned at him, frowned at the room, at all its lumber yard banality.

  “You’re onto something.” Staples was staring at me as though I were an egg and he’d just heard cracking sounds.

  I said, “Kaklov and the receptionist and the guard all went upstairs at twelve. They all came down together at one?”

  “Right.”

  “Kaklov came in here, and the other two stayed outside. That was at one o’clock. When was the body found?”

  “Three-thirty. A phone call from outside came through for Kaklov, the receptionist buzzed, there wasn’t any answer, she knocked on the door, she and the guard talked it over, and finally the guard broke the door in.”

  “Between one and three-thirty, did Kaklov have any visitors?”

  “No.”

  “Any other phone calls?”

  “No.”

  Bray had also come over, and now he said, “The preliminary medical report says he’d been dead at least a couple of hours when he was examined. Meaning probably before two.”

  I said, “Or as close to one o’clock as the assassin could make it.”

  “Looks that way.”

  I frowned at the room. The answer was in here somewhere. I felt I could almost reach out and touch it. I said, “The assassin came in during lunch and hid in the bathroom. Kaklov came in at one o’clock, locked the door, and the assassin killed him. The guard broke the door down at three-thirty, and Kaklov was in here alone.” Looking back at Bray, I said, “What about after they found the body? Any time when there wasn’t anyone around?”

  But Bray shook his head. “There’s a special police detachment a block from here,” he said. “For the UN. There were officers on the scene within five minutes, and both the receptionist and the guard swear they stayed right in that office the whole time.”

  “I was afraid that was the answer.” I leaned against the paneled wall, folding my arms and looking around this damn bland enigmatic room. I said, “I find myself thinking of the Sherlock Holmes dictum: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ So what are the impossibilities here?”

  Bray said, “The whole thing is impossible. This isn’t the kind of case I like.”

  “No, let’s think about it.” I looked over at the desk again, where the killing had taken place. “The assassin getting in was possible. The assassin committing the crime was possible.”

  “The assassin getting out again,” Bray said. “That’s impossible.”

  “So we eliminate that.” Smiling as though I knew what I was doing, I said, “In approved Sherlock Holmes style, we eliminate the impossible. The assassin did get out. So where does that leave us?”

  “Up a tree,” suggested Staples.

  “Up a—” Then it hit me. “Of course!”

  They both stared at me. Half-whispering, Staples said, “You’ve got it?”

  “Of course I’ve got it. If the assassin didn’t get out of this room, Fred, then he’s still here.”

  Bray said, “If you mean suicide, Kaklov did it himself, it won’t work. A man can’t strangle himself, not that way.”

  “No, there was a killer,” I agreed. “But the point is, he’s still in this room. That’s what the dirt on the paper shredder is all about.”

  “Dirt on the paper shredder?” Staples went over to frown at it. “Yeah, you’re right. So what?”

  “Think, Fred. Think about the dirt on the bathroom floor.”

  “Smudged footprints.” He transferred his bewildered frown from the paper shredder to me. “He stood on the paper shredder?”

  “Certainly. Don’t you know where he is?” I pointed up. “He’s in the ceiling.”

  * * *

  I was right, of course. Dropped ceilings are constructed of a metal gridwork hung by wires from the beams of the original ceiling. The two-foot by four-foot fiberboard rectangles simply lie in this grid, and can be pushed up and out of the way. A space of a foot or more is left below the old ceiling, to leave room for the fluorescent light fixtures and for the fiberboard pieces to be slipped up over the grid.

  The gridwork isn’t very strong, and wouldn’t normally support the weight of a man, but this was a special case. First, the killer had brought in two six-foot lengths of thin lumber and placed them diagonally across the grid, spreading the weight. Second, the killer wasn’t a man but a woman, a slender twentyish girl who couldn’t have weighed over a hundred pounds.

  A hundred very nasty pounds, I might say. When Fred Staples, following my suggestion, climbed up on the paper shredder, lifted the nearest section of fiberboard and stuck his head in between the ceilings to look, she kicked him in the face. He gave a yelp and came catapulting off the shredder and into my arms, the fiberboard rectangle bouncing and careening around us, while at the same time the girl came through another ceiling section and landed feet first on Al Bray’s head.

  Both cops were yelling, I was falling down from the weight of Fred Staples, and Al Bray was being beaten to the ground by the furious knees, heels, elbows, fists and forehead of the woman wrapped around his neck. She was dressed all in black—shoes, slacks, sweater—and she’d descended more like a demon than a human being.

  “Stop her!” Bray yelled from the floor, and I wriggled out from under Staples just in time to snap my fingers around her near ankle as she scurried for the door.

  I learned to regret that. She turned back the way a cat does when its hind leg is grabbed. The first thing she did was leave three long fingernail gashes on my right wrist, and the second thing she did was leave four long fingernail gashes on my left cheek. Then Bray arrived, and hit her very very hard with his fist on the side of her head, just above the ear. (He later explained that in all head-punching the target should be an area covered by hair, to minimize visible bruises later. Every trade has its expertise.)

  The girl fell down when Bray hit her, and he immediately stepped on her long hair, so she couldn’t get up again. When she snapped her head around to bite his ankle he rested his other foot on her throat and said, “Think it over.”

  She thought it over, glaring up at everybody, and while she was thinking Fred Staples put her wrists in handcuffs behind her back. They stood her up then, and frisked her in a thorough blunt irritable way that had nothing of sex in it at all.

  Meantime, my wrist and face were both beginning to sting. I licked my wrist, but couldn’t do much about my face. I also went to the nearest vinyl divan and sat down, feeling a bit shaky.

  The girl had suddenly become very vocal. She shouted a lot of fierce things, undoubtedly of a political nature, burning with passion and historical ignorance, but since this Nathan Halizing was being done in that k-k-k language I took to be Visarian I remained ignorant of her specific quarrel with the late Mr. Kaklov. Al Bray rapped her with a knuckle in the hair a couple of times and she subsided, but continued muttering and glaring at everybody.

  Bray and a uniformed cop then took the girl away, and Fred Staples came over to me with a handkerchief extended in his right hand. “What’s that for?” I said. “I’m not crying.”

  “No, you’re bleeding.”

  “I’m what?” Grabbing the handkerchief, I pressed it to the stinging side of my face, and it came away with diagonal red lines on it. “That’s my blood!”

  “Better come with me,” he said.

  NINE

  The Death of the Party

  After the hospital, where they gave me a shot and a scrub and some gauze bandage on my cheek, I went with Staples back to my apartment and we discussed the Laura Penney murder some more. He assured me they were investigating possibilities other than the guilt of Kit
Markowitz, meaning they were still checking into the five original male suspects. I asked him the questions Kit had assigned me, and he said no, they hadn’t established solid alibis for Jay English or Dave Poumon, mostly because the initial interview with that pair had seemed conclusive enough. As for Claire and Ellen, Kit’s two alternate female suspects. Staples acknowledged they’d studied Claire a bit without establishing much of anything, but Ellen came as a surprise to him. He made himself a note, and I said, “Our investigations overlap.”

  “The more the merrier,” he told me. “I really want to solve this Laura Penney murder, Carey.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Next I asked him about the anonymous letter, and he turned out to have a Xerox copy of it on his person. He let me make my own copy, in longhand, and then a phone call from his office summoned him away.

  I hadn’t wanted to check my messages while he was there, not being absolutely certain Patricia wouldn’t be cute in spite of my warning, but it turned out to be just the usual dull band of voices, including Shirley, calling from Boston again about those damned papers she wanted signed: “I know you have them by now, and this time I’m serious. If I don’t receive them by tomorrow, my Boston attorney is going to hire a New York attorney. At your expense.”

  Papers, papers. Yes, I remembered receiving them, but had I ever signed and returned them? With all this other stuff going on, I was pretty sure I hadn’t, but when I went through the crap on my desk they weren’t there.

  Damn. Who needed this annoyance? I spent ten minutes searching the apartment, in every likely and unlikely corner, and finally had to give up and call Shirley, a thing I hate to do. One of the brats answered—until John’s voice changes, which I presume it will some day, there’s no way to tell them apart, even if I wanted to—but then Shirley came on the line and I said, “Look, I’m not trying to make trouble, but I lost those damn papers.”

  “You’re such a bullshitter, Carey.”